THE Nausori Town Council and Pacific Energy organised a “Beat Plastic Pollution” clean-up campaign on Saturday.
The council’s chief executive officer Akhtar Ali said the campaign was a celebration of environmental clean-up.
The campaign focused on addressing plastic pollution. He said it was “a very successful program”, attended by “about 200 people”.
Since the launch of the program in June this year, Mr Ali said, it had been included in all municipalities. Their main target, he said, was to address the excessive amount of plastics within the environment.
On the international scene, the Daily Mail published a report on Sunday about the world’s largest ocean clean-up now in progress in the Pacific Ocean. The target is to collect up to 150,000 pounds of trash in its first year.
Eventually The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit orgnisation is looking to tackle the Great Pacific garbage patch.
The organisation deployed a $20 million system on Saturday from the San Francisco Bay, the Daily Mail reported, for several weeks of testing before it’s officially set into motion.
The project, the Mail said, placed a 2000-foot unmanned floating boom into the water, designed to curve into the shape of a U as it’s pushed by the currents, and like ‘Pac-Man’ eat up trash and hold it inside its structure.
According to the Mail, ‘Within five years the organisation hopes the boom — called System 001 — will clean half of the Great Pacific garbage patch, a stunning pile of floating trash between California and Hawaii comprised of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of scattered detritus and at least 87,000 of plastic.
The reality is that the garbage patch did not just pop up out of nowhere. It has grown because of humans.
It is because of our inconsiderate action, and obviously our lack of concern for the environment.
Campaigns such as the one organised in Nausori are critical for the protection of the environment. There must be some sense of appreciation of our environment whipped into some of us.
Otherwise we may just welcome a period in the future where plastic garbage has become a prominent feature of our once beautiful environment.
The campaign starts with us as individuals, taking responsibility for our actions.
We shouldn’t be waiting for such campaigns to start anyway.
We should be developing a habit that embraces being proactive and vigilant about our plastic waste.
